U.K. Oil, Power Workers Strike as Foreign Staff Protest Spreads

By Paul Dobson and Ben Farey

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Workers at U.K. oil refineries and power plants walked out as a three-day protest against the employment of foreign staff at a Total SA plant expanded.

The strike spread to BP Plc’s Forties Pipeline System and Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s St. Fergus gas plant in Scotland. Contract workers walked out at Scottish & Southern Plc’s Fiddler’s Ferry power station in Cheshire and RWE AG’s Aberthaw plant in Wales.

Protestors gathered outside Total’s Lindsey plant in northeast England today to demand government action to protect jobs after the recession increased unemployment claims to a 9- year high. About 600 contractors at the 200,000 barrel-a-day refinery remain on strike, Total said. Foreign workers at the plant were told to stay at home today.

“I understand people’s anxieties about their jobs,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said today in Davos. “The action we’ve taken to help people in work to stay in work, to help people who lose their jobs to get new jobs, to help young people to get skills, it’s the right way to deal with that.”

Contract workers at the Ineos Group Holding Plc’s plant in Scotland stopped work today, spokesman Richard Longden said. Workers at ConocoPhillip’s Humber refinery, Scottish Power Plc’s Longannet plant, and BP’s Dimlington gas terminal walked out yesterday.

Meetings were taking place to end the dispute and production at the Lindsey remained unaffected, spokesman Iain Hutchison said by phone. The strike started after Italian and Portuguese workers were brought in to work on the construction of a hydro-desulfurization unit.

‘Demanding Right’

“There is sufficient unemployed skilled labor wanting the right to work on that site and they are demanding the right to work on that site,” Bernard McAuley, regional officer for the Unite union said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. today.

BP said the action in Scotland followed similar protests at its Dimlington gas plant and Saltend chemical site in northeast England yesterday.

National Grid Plc data showed flows at the Dimlington terminal dropped to about 1 million cubic meters a day from about 7 million earlier this week. BP said operations at all its sites were unaffected by the walkout.

At Aberthaw, 50 contractors staged a protest, RWE npower spokeswoman Jennifer Crawford said by phone. The plant is running normally and no other plants are affected, she said.

Scottish & Southern Plc spokeswoman Jennifer McGregor said production at the Fiddler’s Ferry coal-fired plant was unaffected by the contractor walk out.

Steel Plant

Protests also spread to Corus Plc’s Redcar steel plant and a chemical plant at Wilton in northeast England, the BBC said. As many as 300 stopped work at Grangemouth, it said.

Scottish Power, the U.K. unit of Iberdrola SA, said labor protests at its Longannet and Cockenzie coal-fired plants aren’t disrupting output.

The company will be holding talks with contractors and unions to resolve the dispute, spokesman Simon McMillan said today in a telephone interview.

At Longannet, the contractors were working on technology to reduce emissions of poisonous gases from the plant. The impact will be “negligible,” because it’s a three-year project, he said. At Cockenzie, Scottish Power has its own staff to cover for the absent contractors, who were working on general maintenance.

In September 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers,” referring to job creation, rather than job protection. The economy was growing at the time. This week, in the face of recession, he made a speech warning against protectionism, a message he said he’d take to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he’s speaking today and tomorrow.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alexander Kwiatkowski in London at akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net; Ben Farey in London at bfarey@bloomberg.net.